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Monday, October 7, 2013

HEY KLOUT

Dear Klout, As a digital marketer I have long read about people having issues with the way you calculated people's scores, but not personally having much more than your average Facebook/LinkedIn'ers presence I was never that concerned.

What I never realized until I went to update my profile after just over a year of blogging was that I could not connect my Facebook personal profile, my Facebook blog fan page and the Facebook page for the the Winnipeg Bulb Project, the not-for-profit I started this year, which I started as an individual, a gardener and a blogger.

This line of thought is not just the product of me feeling undervalued with my current score of 50, after all I am not even sure if it is evaluating me as an individual or as a blogger. Who could ever keep track, did I even set up two separate accounts?

But I am interested in innovation and surely there has got to be some kind of algorithm you could develop to detect the likelihood that the people viewing content in one of my areas is aware of the existence of the others. And surely it is logical to assume then that when the consumers of the content are aware of the connection it would behoove you to acknowledge the same. I'll grant you that trying to evaluate the degree to which one specific part influences the others is beyond reasonable but understanding that the three work together is not.

Not at all.

The number of links, the same or similar content shared across platforms, especially photos and videos that would make it abundantly clear to anyone I am the same person. Degree of cross over in fan base. You should be able to evaluate content enough to get a genuine feel for the degree of transparency.

And for people who have multiple but very different interests and communities of influence?

Don't look to me, I don't have all of the answers. After all I am just some guy who's been thinking about it for an evening.

You are the professionals.

It would be better to calculate their score taking this into account than to ignore it. If their fan base triples taking it all into consideration it seems only reasonable you give them a more influential score.

With that said, you should leave the burden of registering multiple properties on your users' shoulders once you figure it out because it is not up to you to draw those connections if a customer would prefer privacy. No need to out the philandering husbands & hobbyist authors of erotica/accountants of the world.

But it should be an option.

If you have any interest in Google/Amazon/Microsoft or even SalesForce.com paying top dollar for you one day you better figure it out before they decide to stop waiting and go ahead and try their own hand at it.

I hear some of them are pretty handy with an algorithm.

*Disclaimer*

I did no research for this post and I really do not know much about Klout's competitive set, business strategy or host of other things that could be relevant. I just know that if it required any more work than an initial registration me and many others would quickly decide Klout was more effort than it is worth and I know that when I searched on their name there were very few recent articles and it is time they fixed these issues if they want to be relevant.